


your heart of gold it pulses

by gettingthatyellowjaundice



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Letters, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:21:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25555744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gettingthatyellowjaundice/pseuds/gettingthatyellowjaundice
Summary: The first letter Eugene writes him is careful. No allusions made to the sand and the heat. Shelton would laugh his ass off if he did.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 14
Kudos: 26
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	your heart of gold it pulses

Eugene wonders where Shelton is, sometimes. Where do men like him go in peacetime? What do they do? Do they go to cafes and read books and sleep and dream like everybody else? Picture him walking through a park with his hands in his pockets, his shirt slightly too large for him, a breeze in his hair. He stops and picks a flower. No. No, Shelton doesn’t do that. Men like him don’t know peace. They don’t know how to pick flowers.

Shelton hardly sleeps. He tosses and turns. Picture him with moonlight streaming across his face and dead skin on his lips. The room smells of cigarette smoke, it must do. Some things never change. He stares sullenly at the wall and only god knows what he is thinking. It’s a hot, dark room. He’s as thin as a wraith. Oh, not even the window is open because he doesn’t like the breeze, he likes too much to be alone.

Always so predictable, that Shelton. 

Always so gullible, Eugene.

The years pass quietly and things change, as things are wont to do. He attends weddings of men who used to be boys and Burgin writes to tell him that his won’t be happening. She got tired of waiting, I guess, is what he says. We were too young, he says. Bill Leyden writes to say that he’s stayed in New York and married a woman he met on a train, but now he’s realized he doesn’t love her and has asked for a divorce. She drinks, he says, she drinks too much and I’m damn sick of it. Jay never writes him at all and joins Shelton in the corridors of Eugene’s imagination, walking silently down the street with his small, drawn face turned away. 

He thinks of Shelton from time to time and his smoke-filled room. He doesn’t change much. Grows a little older, that’s all. He was born old anyhow, that Shelton. His Shelton. Hot, dry skin in the nighttime when the beaches in the Pacific were still slightly metallic with the taste of blood; his small, slippery body next to Eugene's own, always just out of reach, never let Eugene touch him for long. That was just the way he was. Ephemeral, he would say, if Shelton were a slightly different man.

The first letter he writes him is careful. No allusions made to the sand and the heat. Shelton would laugh his ass off if he did. He journals things instead. Sid’s wedding, his English professor who wears a hideous tweed jacket every day, what a hot spring it is in Mobile this year. Did Burgin tell him what happened with Flo? Leyden got married. He’d laugh and laugh. Shelton in the dark with his white flashing teeth. Men are crueler than women in love. Maybe Shelton is crueler than most.

(Shelton’s face is made up of strange shadows, almost ugly in their boldness. He leans back and the shadows change their shape, a sea breeze lifts his hair, he asks Eugene: “Would you like me to come back with you, Eugene?” He stretches his name until it’s narrow. “To Alabama? Follow you like a broad?”

“Sure,” Eugene says. “Sure, I’d like that.”

“Tell me about it, then, sugar.” He smiles. His teeth flash white in the darkness. Deja vu, already seen, will see again, will dream of it again.

“What sorts of things you want me to say?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m tired, Eugene. We done fought a war. I want to hear somethin’ nice, somethin’ pretty.”

Shelton leans into him with a grunt. They fall back into the sand. The silhouettes of the palm trees spin dizzyingly above. 

“Haven’t got anything pretty to say,” Eugene whispers into his hair, “just plain things like you probably don’t want to hear. But listen, Snaf, Snafu - there are cities in America where they don’t care none what two men do together so long as they keep it private. I read about them in some newspapers, they’re on the west coast. There’s the sea out there, but it’s nothing like this sea here, nothing like here -”

“What would we do there? You gonna get a degree?”

“I’ve got money, you know. Could take care of you.”

“I oughta be the one takin’ care of you, Gene.”

“We’ll take care of each other.”)

The second letter Eugene writes is so sentimental he wouldn’t send it even if he knew his address. He talks again of the west coast. The fog that hangs over the sea early in the morning (he’d seen this described once in a book), the sharp, flat way the people speak (not like Leyden, but not like himself, either), the cold, cold rain. Not like in Okinawa, of course. An American rain. He finds himself imagining the smell of cigarette smoke, imagining that Shelton leans over him and taps his cigarette and ash falls on his wrist, he presses his mouth to his jawbone, the flame burns his skin. Always so careless. Always so cruel. Men are cruel in love.

He doesn’t send it, and the years pass as quietly as before, with children being born, with Burgie writing to say he's found a new girl and she isn't Flo exactly but she isn't bad. Bill Leyden doesn’t write again. He and Jay and Shelton walk together now, their shoulders brushing in a military line, their faces hard, creased. They grow old. Eugene grows old, too. Growing old doesn’t feel like much. Life gets a little dimmer, that’s all. 

It seems that one day he has passed the age when he might have married, might have had children, might have begun a life, and it is not so bad. He has his house by the university and he gives lectures three times a week, his dog barks and licks his face when he comes home. He drinks coffee in the evenings with Sid, and the weather is good, and life is good, and everything is good. Merriell goes on blowing blue smoke in his shuttered room. He stubs his cigarette out on his arm, it leaves a black burn. Eugene write him a third letter, he writes him a reminiscence: remember China, Merriell? Remember your flat hair in the rain and that smell of sewage and rotting fish in the doorway? How long did we stand there for, was it until dawn, was it then that the rain finally stopped? When morning came you looked so tired, Merriell. You were looking at the horizon of Peking and your eyes were like a hungry old dog's, I was afraid to touch you because I thought you'd bite. We were young. Well, one of us was, anyway. 

He turns sixty-five. Shelton does too, somewhere. Eugene doesn’t know where he is anymore. He still thinks of him walking in a park with his hands in his pockets, of how he might pick a flower. It’s no good; Shelton tosses and turns, never sleeps, grows old this way, shadowed, neurotic, unhappy. Shelton with his white flashing teeth in the dark, cruel in love, cruel in life.


End file.
